NOAA’s National Weather Service is now moving ahead to make our great organization even greater.  These next steps will not fully resolve our current budget challenges, but will position our organization to better respond to our customer’s future needs -- including the larger NOAA mission --and do it more efficiently.  We will continue to work closely with the union as we move forward. 

The following are overviews of the decisions.  More details will follow:

IT Consolidation:

Weather Service will centralize IT management, providing more efficient and effective services while reducing the total effort expended supporting these functions.  The Corporate Board agreed that we are ready to begin consolidating the following six areas:  Wide Area Network: Network Management; IT Security; Active Directory; Procurement; and the Web Infrastructure.  Our plan is to use proven technologies and widely-adopted industry standards so there is no need to prototype.  One advantage of this consolidation is to reduce excess workload among our IT professionals so they can focus on mission critical tasks.  There are no plans to reduce field IT positions, rather we envision using our skilled people to help develop better ways to deliver
our products NWS-wide. 

Developing an Organization-Wide Concept of Operations:

The Corporate Board agreed to prototype a “Clustered Peer” office concept of operations.  A “Clustered Peer” is a group of equal offices that collaborate with each other as well as other NOAA offices (including RFCs and National Centers) to deliver NOAA products and services.  In effect,
we want to prototype if a group of clustered offices can operate as one large unit with the same “get it done” culture that is already the best practice within our current field structure.  The prototype will answer questions on how we can best gain efficiencies while improving service. 

The concept depends on an NWS organization that exemplifies trust up, down, and across the organization and co-ownership of our entire service delivery process.  Testing this concept will determine if, by shifting workloads, the National Weather Service can become more efficient and provide a greater focus on the high-impact events (the key improvement that matters most to our customers), while maintaining a local expertise and an improved quality of work life for our employees. 

Aviation Initiative:

This initiative has a great sense of urgency.  The FAA is under a lot of pressure to improve its operations of the National Air Space and that translates into pressure upon us.  In particular, we must demonstrate the capability of providing enhanced Central Weather Service Unit services and reduce costs to the FAA -- immediately.  Next steps are to compare providing services from the Baltimore/Washington WFO for the Leesburg CWSU and providing services from the Dallas/Ft. Worth CWSU for a larger domain and the tools to enable us to provide essential environmental information to TRACONS, Tower, and other FAA ATC nodes. 

The Way Ahead:

All prototypes and demonstrations will start as soon as possible.  Four new teams will move the National Weather Service into the next phase:  IT Consolidation Team; CONOPS Prototype Team; Aviation Demonstration Team; and a Coordination Team (to provide executive oversight and coordination, organize topic level timelines, and conduct budgeting and communication activities).

Look for an announcement of a Web-based opportunity to interact with me on these matters in February.